Working chips from high level synthesis: a case study from industry

Despite intense activity in the high level synthesis research community over the past several years, to our knowledge no working fabricated chips from a general purpose high level synthesis tool have previously been reported. This paper describes the use of a high level synthesis tool to design two chips for future automotive applications. Both chips have been fabricated and tested and work correctly at speed in their target system. An FFT chip contains 176930 transistors and measures 241 by 245 mils, while a Viterbi chip contains 67790 transistors and measures 165 by 162 mils. Two weeks of combined high level synthesis for both chips replaced 9 man-months of detailed datapath schematic and control logic design